Janet Kruskamp's Paintings - A Romantic Display, an article about Janet Kruskamp

A Romantic Display
Originally published in California Today Magazine, San Jose News, July, 1976
by Ted Bredt

A year of travel has produced a selection of paintings by San Jose artist Janet Kruskamp that capture America the way it is this Bicentennial year.

Janet Kruskamp, the Santa Clara Valley’s foremost exponent of romantic realism in painting, has come up with another winning exhibition currently on view at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.

The theme of her latest show is An Artist in Search of America. The showing is officially endorsed by the San Jose Bicentennial Committee and well it should be.

The artist, through the past year, has traveled over 25,000 miles by auto, several thousand more by air, studying and sketching the American scene. Avoiding the obvious tourist spots, Kruskamp has endeavored to create a sort of nostalgic time capsule with each painting. Her expressed desire is to capture the way we are in the Seventies. The artist, herself, describes the paintings as the “nostalgia of tomorrow.” “Like the blind men who went to ‘see’ the elephant, and each saw it in a different way, it’s possible that my view of America could be very different from someone else’s,” says the artist. “I cannot promise that this America is the America you will find, for each person could bring home a different account of the same region or it’s inhabitants.”

Janet Kruskamp’s America, however, is real enough-if made super romantic because of her love for the commonplace and her uncommon talent to portray it two-dimensionally. Though we have selected only those paintings made in California, the exhibition covers a great deal more of the Union-from the deep south to the Yankee northeast. All of it is a treat. The exhibition will continue through July 28.

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